Learn about PXP's transaction risk screening service.
The transaction risk screening service is a payment fraud prevention solution designed to assess the risk profile of every transaction before or after it is processed. By leveraging advanced data analytics, behavioural insights, and rule-based logic, the service helps you proactively detect and prevent fraudulent or suspicious activity.
Integrated either directly within the payment process or as a standalone fraud check, the service enables you to make real-time, risk-informed decisions. This helps reduce chargebacks, minimise revenue loss, enhance operational efficiency, and support compliance with regulatory requirements.
To power this capability, we use Kount, a leading third-party fraud prevention platform. Kount applies advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyse each transaction, evaluating factors such as device information, customer behaviour, historical transaction patterns, geolocation, and many others. For every transaction screened, Kount returns a risk score that indicates the likelihood of fraud — ranging from low to high risk. This score can then be applied against your configured rules and business logic to determine whether to approve or decline a transaction.
With transaction risk screening, you benefit from:
- Real-time fraud detection: Instantly evaluates transactions using AI and behavioural analytics to identify and prevent fraudulent activity before it impacts your business.
- Flexible risk strategy: Supports multiple evaluation approaches (e.g., pre- or post-authorisation) and allows configuration at the merchant level to align with specific risk appetites.
- Reduced chargebacks and losses: By accurately flagging high-risk transactions, the service helps prevent unauthorised payments and significantly lowers chargeback rates.
- Enhanced customer experience: Minimises false declines by allowing legitimate transactions to proceed smoothly, ensuring a seamless and trustworthy payment experience.
- Data-enriched decisions: Leverages a combination of device, behavioural, transaction, and network data to make more accurate and context-aware fraud decisions.
For each transaction, you'll receive a risk score that quantifies the likelihood of fraud based on real-time data analysis. This score typically ranges from low to high, with higher scores indicating a greater risk of fraudulent activity.
The risk score is calculated using AI-driven algorithms and takes into account a wide range of signals, including:
- The device used for the transaction.
- The geographic location of the customer.
- Matching patterns associated with known fraudulent behaviours.
- The customer's purchase history and velocity.
- Whether the payment method or instrument has previously been linked to fraud.
The score itself doesn't directly approve or decline a transaction. Instead, it acts as a critical input into a decisioning engine configured by you, which evaluates the score against preset thresholds and rules.
For example:
- Score < 300 → Accept (low risk)
- Score > 300 → Reject (high risk)
In more advanced setups, the score can be combined with other rule conditions such as:
IF Risk Score > 100 AND < 300 AND Payment Method = PayPal AND Country = BR, THEN Outcome = Reject.
You configure these rules and determine the final outcome of the evaluation:
- Accept: Proceed with transaction authorisation.
- Reject: Block the transaction before authorisation or capture.
When a customer initiates a deposit, the transaction request is generated and received by the PXP platform.
The transaction details are securely sent to Kount, our third-party fraud screening provider, for real-time risk evaluation.
Kount reviews the request using a combination of:
- Its global fraud data network.
- Device fingerprinting.
- Behavioural and identity insights.
- AI and machine learning models.
This helps identify patterns or signals that may indicate fraud.
Based on the analysis, Kount generates a risk score and, combined with other rule conditions, returns a risk screening result with a recommended action—such as approve or decline.
Based on the result, you determine the final outcome of the transaction—whether to proceed with the authorisation or abort the transaction.
The transaction risk screening service can be enabled at either the merchant group level or the individual merchant level, offering flexibility in how the service is applied across the business.
When you subscribe at the merchant group level, it's automatically enabled for all merchants within that group. This ensures consistent risk screening policies across your entire portfolio and simplifies management.
Alternatively, you can enable the service for specific merchants independently, giving you more granular control over which entities within a group use the service.